Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The others — the weak ones — shouldn’t have done it in the first place. They weren’t meant for murder — except on the receiving end. Because now all he felt was a supreme sense of well-being, placidity, repose; the calm after the storm. The way you feel when you come off the massage table in a Turkish bath, with every muscle encased in velvet and every nerve resting on rose petals.

Six long years of pent-up hate had been swept away, all in the space of a single minute (“It only takes a minute to die,” he’d said), and now he was shiny-new again, whole again, his own man again, free to lead his own life again.

He stood there by the window, his hands expansively in his pockets, teetering buoyantly on the balls of his feet, up and then down again, up and down. He stood there by the window, but he wasn’t looking out; he was looking inward, at himself, and he was content with what he saw. Love can’t hold a candle to murder, when it comes to emotional intensity and satisfaction. Not little fly-by-night, potshot murders in the course of a holdup, no; but a murder like this, like his, the goal of six years of hoping, planning, waiting, seething, living with it, almost dying with it.

He could have checked out then and there; there was nothing to keep him in the hotel any longer. But he thought, why mar an otherwise perfect accomplishment by a single false note, when it isn’t necessary? To check out at two in the morning from a room directly opposite the one in which a man will be found murdered is bound to be remembered afterward. But to check out at nine in the morning, perhaps after an innocent-looking attempt to call the dead man’s room to suggest they have breakfast together — that would be a master stroke of tactics, of bravado.

He couldn’t have been expected to hear the shot; other rooms nearby were occupied, the clerk had said, and the people in those rooms obviously hadn’t heard it. And there was no way in which he could be placed in the murder room — no way at all.

Yes, the clever thing to do was to stay on, normally, naturally. And it took no courage to do it, as he found when he proceeded to do so. He unslung his necktie, without taking it off; even, presently, asked for bar service and ordered a double bourbon sent up to the room.

He was amazed, after he’d finished it, to find himself actually nodding, dozing off, in the chair in which he was sitting. He picked himself up, went over to the bed, and lay down on it, without taking off his clothes, only his shoes.

He wouldn’t have believed it was going to happen, but the next thing he knew he opened his eyes and it was past nine in the morning. There was an unusual amount of subdued coming and going immediately outside his door, even for a bustling little hotel, and he saw that he’d slept for six hours, deeply, dreamlessly.

He wondered if anyone had ever done that, in the whole history of the world, after doing what he’d done the night before.

After he had showered and shaved — the hotel provided its male guests with little complimentary shaving kits, in case they were caught without their own, as he had been — he stuck his head out the door and took a quick, inquiring look. No harm in that, anyone would have, with the amount of traffic going on in and out the opposite door. At that particular moment the door across the corridor happened to be closed, but there was a conspicuous Do Not Disturb sign dangling from its knob. It was still jittering from its last swing back and forth. There was a low sound of voices going on in the room.

He shut himself in again, hesitated briefly, then picked up the phone and said casually, “Room 212, please.”

The girl was patently disconcerted by it. She gave a noticeable breath-catch, said, “One moment please,” and then went offside, apparently to ask instructions about what to do.

When she came back again she said, “I’m sorry, I can’t reach Room 212 just now.”

You bet you can’t, he thought grimly.

“Do you care to leave a message?”

“No, nothing important,” he said indifferently, and hung up. It would have involved leaving his name, and that would have been going a little too far. But the indifference in his voice wasn’t put on; it was a genuine indifference — he really felt that way.

He decided to soak in, luxuriate in the sensation of complete immunity he had — to enjoy it, to play it up for all it was worth.

So he went to the phone and ordered breakfast sent up to his room. A big breakfast, with all the trimmings. It was a time to celebrate, to indulge himself.

It arrived remarkably quick, in less than ten minutes, but when he opened the door in answer to the knock, instead of breakfast he got two detectives.

They announced what they were, then came on in without waiting to be asked.

They began questioning almost before the door had closed behind them.

“Did you hear any sounds in the room opposite you — 212 — at any time during the night?”

“Not a thing. I slept like a log,” he said. Which was the truth.

“Mind if I use your phone?” one of them then said.

“Go right ahead.” But he wondered why they hadn’t used the one in the murder room, which was just a few steps away.

“What’s that number again, Barney?” one of them now asked the other.

His partner answered, “You’re a very absent-minded guy, Jack. Can’t even keep a telephone number in your head.”

Killare somehow received the impression that the conversation was completely insincere and meant only for his benefit.

“I’ll look it up,” the first one said. “Got a directory in here?” he asked Killare.

“Sure, help yourself.”

“Where is it?”

Killare saw the hole opening under his feet.

But there was nothing he could do.

He went tumbling in headlong, beyond all escape and all recovery.

The book wasn’t in here. It was in there.

“You better come along with us,” was the next remark. No more questioning, no more fooling around. All business now — deadly business.

“We checked every room on this floor. Every room but two has one directory in it. Standard equipment. One room has two in it. Where he died. One has none. This one.”

They took a half-tum twist in his coat sleeve, one on each side of him.

“That doesn’t place me in there,” he said stubbornly. “How do you know it belongs in here? It might have come from somewhere else.”

“Each directory is in a special hotel-binding. With the hotel’s name stamped on the top of it. And the number of the room it belongs in. The second one in there has 211 at the top big as life.”

One of them closed the door after the three of them with his free hand.

The Do Not Disturb sign on the opposite door seemed to mock Killare as he went past it. It even quivered a little with the draft from their passing — the way a person shakes a little when he’s laughing to himself.

As usual Leone was well in advance of the nightly seven o’clock stampede to quit work and go home. She was the first of them all to reach the bronze statuette with its spray of flesh-colored light-bulbs at the foot of the stairs on the main floor, while the rest of the girls were still only working their way down from the upper floors. Their clamor could be heard coming down the staircase ahead of them, they were like a bunch of noisy school-children when the dismissal-bell has rung.

“Take it easy there!” a voice ordered with phony severity as her feet came off the last step onto the marble floor with a flat, slapping impact.